Augmented reality for collaborative product design and development

This paper presents the application of Augmented Reality (AR) to support concurrent collaborative product design among members of a multi-disciplinary team. A client/server framework has been developed to enable users in a distributed environment to carry out product design collaboratively. An intuitive interface, consisting of virtual and tangible interfaces, and a tri-layer model representation scheme have been designed and developed to support solid modeling and collaborative design activities in the AR-based environment. Using AR technology, the users wearing head-mounted devices can move about in a physical 3D space to view a part that is being designed from different angles and perspectives. The users can observe the design effects in real-time as the modifications are being made in the 3D space.